Germany’s political landscape was shaken on Sunday after a right-wing party delivered a landmark performance in a state election, handing Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union a significant setback.
According to exit polling reported by public broadcaster ARD, Alternative for Germany, the Elon Musk-backed party widely described by critics as extremist, captured 44.5% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. Merz’s CDU trailed far behind, drawing just 18.5% support.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel celebrated the result as a breakthrough moment for the party, calling it “historic” while predicting that Merz’s conservatives would struggle to win future contests.
“We are going to see explosive growth across all of East Germany — and at the federal level, too,” Weidel said in an interview with public broadcaster ZDF.
The CDU, however, signaled it has no intention of softening its stance toward the rising right-wing movement. Franziska Hoppermann, the party’s national general secretary, pushed back firmly against any suggestion of cooperation.
“AfD is a right-wing extremist party. It wants to leave the euro; that would be economic downfall. … It works closely together with Russia, it wants a completely different social model,” Hoppermann said. “We will not work with them.”
Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, said the outcome reflected deeper frustration with Berlin. “This election result is, above all, a vote of no confidence in the federal government,” he told Reuters.
Alternative for Germany has built its platform around pro-Russia positions, hard-line anti-migration policies and socially conservative proposals, including support for banning rainbow flags in schools.
Still it remains to be seen if the party will be able to create its own government in the state, as most other parties have ruled out joining an AfD-led coalition.
Projections of Sunday’s election suggest the AfD would win between 39 and 41 seats of Saxony-Anhalt’s 82-seat state parliament
That still leaves the AfD just short of absolute majority, although much further ahead of other parties.
The left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a potential AfD coalition partner, could make AfD governance possible if it clears the threshold to grab a seat.
The right-wing party remains a controversial group in Germany, with the country’s domestic intelligence service dubbing the group as “right-wing extremist,” a classification that the AfD rejects.
No right-wing party has ever won control of a single German state since World War II.
Voter turnout in Saxony-Anhalt was particularly high at an estimated 78%.
Saxony-Anhalt has the sixth smallest population in the country at just 2.1 million people, with only 7.9% identifying as foreigners, among the smallest percentages in all of Germany, according to national data.
With Post Wires
